As promised, the first post my wife wrote about Iran back then, before the trip took place in August 2010.
Why Iran? That was the question I heard most recently. Two months ago, my husband and I decided to do a different trip. The chosen destination (by him): Iran. Friends and family always asking: “-Why Iran?”. As I also was not 100% convinced and kept asking the same thing, so I always let him answering. The arguments are: 1) he will give a lecture on Entrepreneurship in Emerging Markets, and the only region that he did not know in first person was the Middle East, 2) We have a world map at home with a stick in the countries we already know and that region was very clean; 3) We wanted to visit an Islamic country; 4) We have a pact to make exotic trips and trips to “dangerous” countries before having babies; 5) We like to break paradigms and we were intrigued to know more about Iran, its atomic program and stoning, the only information that arrived about it in Brazil, and finally 6) With him, I go to anywhere in the world, even to Iran.
Once convinced to make that trip, I began to be immersed in its culture. I searched for information in various media: internet, magazines (“Carta Capital” had a very nice story and “Viagem e Turismo” too), TV (“não conta lá em casa” cable TV show), movies (“Persepolis” and “White Balloon”), books (“What I did not tell” by Azar Nafisi – one of the most famous writers from Iran, “O Irã sob o Chador” recently released in Portuguese, this book was written by two Brazilian journalists who traveled to Iran alone with our best travel companion, Lonely Planet), and also talked to some Iranian colleagues who live there and here in Brazil. I was impressed with the amount of interesting information that we found.
Being armed with so much information, I began to prepare psychologically for the trip. I found a country with a culture very different from ours, especially regarding the role of women in society. Some things made me really impressed at first. The woman cannot show the body, or wear clothes that show their silhouette. The typical outfit is the chador, a long black coat with a scarf on the head, also black. It should always cover their hair, arms and legs. Men and women cannot go hand in hand and they must never touch each other in public. A woman cannot look to a man in his eyes, otherwise he’ll think you’re insinuating. There’s a specific police, known for its violence, which is overseeing the women to ensure they are using the proper cloth and avoiding contact with the opposite sex. To sleep in the same hotel room, the couple must present a marriage certificate. And worst of all, in a dinner with an Iranian couple, the woman should not speak unless she is considered by an Iranian as a “half man” (whatever what that means!).
You should also be asking: “- So why Iran, are you crazy?”. Actually, after everything I’ve read I became really curious about it, and started to get excited. And to make this trip a little more exciting, the next day we bought the air ticket, we found out that it was going to be Ramadan, one month of fasting and intense prayer where Muslims (including non-Muslim tourists) cannot eat or drink anything from sunrise until the sunset. Seventh reason to go to Iran: loss weight!
We took some care in planning the trip to bring the marriage certificate in English, booking good hotels with internet, making contacts with Iranian friends, researching the costumes of the women at the time to pack and the most impotant, take an official shirt of the Brazilian football team. This is an ace in the hole we Brazilians always use in such trips. Never fails!
Finally it was time to embark, and we just had to hope that everything was going to be all right!
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